operating-system

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How to trace and visualize POSIX threads

Writing even a simple multi-threaded program is a complex problem, synchronization issues are always around the corner, causing race conditions which can lead to deadlock or resource starvation; and the stress of not being sure that our program works correctly is another component of the complexity.


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User-aware scheduling

Recently both OSnews and Slashdot pointed out some experiments about context-aware UIs done by Christian Giordano at Canonical (the company behind Ubuntu GNU/Linux), and the first results are somewhat interesting. As you can see in the good video demo from the original article the effects are nothing mind blowing, but they serve greatly to illustrate the concept, and by building on that something more useful would come out eventually.

That reminds me of another (never realized) old idea of mine from when I was attending the Operating System course at the university, I wanted to bind system responsiveness —at a lower level— to user presence, by tuning scheduler parameters according to the user being at his/her computer or not.